Jurassic World: Dominion

 

Gillipedia Official Rating: So bad this film brought us back to the Triassic era

Score: 4/10

          Okay, I relented. Time to score these films on a 1-10 scale. Which does not bode well for our first-ever rating with Jurassic World: Dominion sitting at a paltry 4/10. This film, outside of fleeting entertaining moments, is hot garbage. I’ll break it down, but save your money on this one.

          Let’s start in general. There is a terrible flow to the film. Each scene feels contained within itself. It’s like the filmmakers wanted a scene with the velociraptors, they wanted one on an icy lake, and in a jungle, a giant dino battle, a chase scene, so on and so forth. While all of these worlds sound like the perfect elements to a videogame, there has to be connecting threads and emotional investment for a film. There’s a couple of fun shots here and there and a few jump scares, but there’s hardly any suspense, lingering shots, or elements foreshadowed early on that come into play later. Frequently, if there’s an action scene with a dino, it’s pretty standard to showcase the prehistoric creature almost immediately. That already desensitizes us to the thrill of the unknown of what blood-thirsty beast might be lurking in the shadows.

          It’s too bad because the opening is actually pretty good. After the events of the second (or rather fifth) film, dinosaurs have been released into the wild. This is broadcast over news segments and show handheld footage of the dinos interacting with everyday objects and in our contemporary lives. The visuals are solid, it introduces us to the world at large, and it sets the stage. After a forgettable scene that shows Bryce Dallas Howard teaming back up with Justice Smith to rescue a baby dino from some poachers, the real plot of the film starts taking shape as Howard is living in a remote cabin along with star Chris Pratt and the British girl who is the genetic clone of an old scientist from the previous film.

          The girl Maisie yearns to venture out into the world and discover what life has to offer, but Howard’s Claire and Pratt’s Owen Grady fear that there are companies and people that only want to kidnap the girl and perform research on her. It doesn’t take long before Maisie sneaks out, gets captured, and the rest of the story is Owen and Claire trying to rescue her. She’s kidnapped by Biosyn which is a genetic company with many resources claiming to take care of the dinosaurs while researching cures for all kinds of diseases. To the absolute surprise of nobody, once again, the big baddie is the evil, greedy corporation. They even keep BD Wong around as Dr. Henry Wu working for this company. I’m so tired of them not being able to come up with any other human villain to have, and it’s used as an excuse for the dinosaurs to keep a supposed sanctuary for themselves in the remote mountaintops of Italy if I’m not mistaken.

          The next action scene takes place in Malta in like an underground market. Owen and Claire stumble upon it, Claire goes to the bathroom, runs into a random lady, and happens to plead with her to help find her daughter. It’s such a stupid setup because of course this lady, a mercenary pilot, becomes one of our main players.

          This Malta scene really should’ve been the highlight of the movie, but all I can think about are the glaring flaws. The great Omar Sy helps our heroes find and trip some of the Biosyn baddies; here, Sy’s team points guns at Biosyn, and then Biosyn points their guns back. There’s yelling, then the camera cuts away, you hear a gunshot, and suddenly, everyone is scattered and allows for individual fights to happen. But that’s the thing. The writers think of a tense situation where you’ve trapped the bad guys, but because they can’t think of a plausible way for the action to continue, they just use editing and cutting to hope in the confusion you don’t pay attention to the fact that despite everyone standing close together with guns pointed, no one is injured and now we’re running after each other and punching each other because that’s more exciting than a gunfight that should’ve been over in 5 seconds. At one point a henchman catches on fire and gets eaten by a T-Rex. That’s fun stuff you would love to see, right? Well, they cut away after he catches on fire, and you only see him get eaten in the background of the next shot while the focus switches to other characters.

          Biosyn has some technology that I don’t understand, but basically, they point a laser pointer, and that triggers the dino’s tummy to tingle, so it’s like a homing beacon. Claire starts running away, falls out of a window, and literally lands in the back of the pilot’s jeep from earlier. The pilot went back to her plane, saw Claire’s daughter being led into a car, and decided that was enough motivation for her to drop everything and be the moral person to help these strangers out. Next thing you know, they’re at her plane ready to chase after Biosyn.

          Meanwhile, Owen takes a motorcycle and narrowly avoids the raptors among other dinos. The driving portion is mildly entertaining, but the CGI raptors are not quite there. Their movements feel floaty, so it isn’t believable whenever they run. Without any communication, Owen happens upon the pilot’s plane and is able to board safely just in the nick of time. This marks the end of the first half, and the rest takes place at Biosyn’s corporation.

          At the same time, Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler and her botox decide to visit Dr. Grant. Classic Jurassic Park music plays, and the shots linger—hoping the pause is for the audience to clap that they paid these aging actors lots of money to return to a much-worse version of the franchise they used to be a part of. Ellie is in contact with Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm who has been teaching chaos principles to college kids at Biosyn’s campus. With an invitation from Malcolm, they take a plane to go visit and try to find evidence of Biosyn’s shady dealings.

          The very next portion of the film is infuriating. The plane starts failing and is going down. Claire has to eject and gets separated. The pilot and Owen end up crashing into an icy lake. When they come to, they feel surprised that they’re still alive. Snowflakes float down as they cautiously step onto the frozen lake and find a smaller dinosaur eyeing them. Keep in mind that Owen is wearing a long-sleeve shirt with the sleeves rolled up. At no point does he roll down the sleeves, acknowledge the cold, or we ever see his breath. Nothing feels authentic, and yes, I’m talking about a movie with real dinosaurs, but it takes away from the experience.

          It turns out this dinosaur likes to swim, so it dives underneath the surface, and our heroes make a run for it. Owen falls into the water as well, and then using his Starlord strength, he like literally jumps out of the water to avoid any attack. Again, they show him soaking wet, and they are able to make their escape. He doesn’t shiver, the freezing cold along with his wet clothes never comes back into play, and they disregard it altogether. This is also the perfect point to mention that the acting is completely phoned in. Chris Pratt looks like he’s having a miserable time in every scene, the villain goes for some weird tech CEO vibe, and none of the performances anywhere are much better.

          It must’ve warmed up that evening because the final dino battle takes place in the rain. Does it add a cool, dramatic effect? Yeah, I can admit that much. But even then, there isn’t any buildup to the final killblow, so we’re not even able to fully enjoy that either.

          Eventually, all of our heroes team up, find what they need, and try to escape with the evidence and the girl. It’s a formulaic process without surprises, humor, or any effort. Directed and co-written by Colin Treverrow, the dialogue is also terrible. Characters will say something either confusing or really cheesy, and this tends to prompt the character they’re speaking to to respond with, “What?” Just because you are self-aware enough to show that the line you wrote for your character is crazy doesn’t excuse the fact that you acknowledge and move on—especially when you do it multiple times. People also stumble over their lines in what I’m guessing is supposed to mimic realistic conversation, but instead it feels like the writers literally didn’t know how they wanted the character to finish their sentence, so they have them simply stop speaking mid-sentence instead. Some of these times I think it’s played for laughs; I gave a chuckle or two during the runtime (primarily whenever Goldblum was speaking), but the pacing, delivery, and editing of the lines is so bad that there wasn’t any laughter in the packed house I watched this movie in.

          There’s no overarching theme that the film has, and it didn’t know how to believably end. Ultimately, what makes Top Gun: Maverick the more successful box office hit is the character elements. We’re able to believe why Tom Cruise is back at Top Gun, and we feel the real stakes of the choices he and the fellow pilots have to make. We’re invested in their success. Here, they had to introduce so many elements that character arcs are thrown to the wayside. All plot elements and motivations are a stretch and how they end up together. The music is only good when it references the original. The effects are mostly good but wasted by the film. I will give props to the fact that some of the more stationary or smaller dinosaurs did appear to actually be animatronics, so that was a nice callback.

          It’s not like you’ll leave the theater mad about what you just watched. Rather, it’s simply disappointing to see how downhill the franchise is now from its ground-breaking original from the book of my favorite author Michael Crichton. There’s not a great selection of films currently out, but don’t bother with this one. If you want a true summer popcorn flick, go watch Top Gun: Maverick. I’m seriously considering watching it a second time just to wash the bad taste of this dino pee out of my mouth. How did that taste get in my mouth in the first place? It’s a reference to Jurassic Park 3 so hush up.